In this paper, we examine the effects of ownership concentration and board characteristics on the performance of listed firms domiciled in Jordan, one of the main emerging markets in the Middle East. Employing 2SLS regressions on a sample of 103 firms listed on the Amman Stock Exchange for...

We study the relationship between female representation on boards and firm value and profitability in Turkey from 2011 to 2018, relying on hand-collected data covering the vast majority of listed firms. We build several proxies of female representation on boards and find no evidence that female...

This Article examines the large, steady, and continuing growth of the Big Three index fund managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Global Advisors. We show that there is a real prospect that index funds will continue to grow, and that voting in most significant public companies will...

Private growth and investment in most of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe (CESEE) is still hampered by persistent financial distress in the corporate sector, resulting from the excessive debt taken on before the 2008 crisis. This paper looks at how this excess leverage affects firm...

This paper examines the economic consequences of the introduction of regulations that mandate listed firms adopt outside directors. The Japanese Companies Act was revised in June 2014, and this revision required listed firms to adopt at least one outside director. Although half of the listed...

Regulators and governance activists are pressuring firms to abolish CEO duality (the Chief Executive Officer is also the Chairman of the Board). However, the literature provides mixed evidence on the relation between CEO duality and firm performance. Using the exogenous shock of the 1989...

We provide the first comprehensive and robust evidence on the relationship between board independence and firm performance in China. We find that independent directors have an overall positive effect on firm operating performance in China. Our findings are robust to a battery of tests, including...

Acquirers do not benefit from hiring the CEOs of firms they buy, either in terms of merger announcement returns or long-run operating performance. This is especially true when the retained CEOs exhibit inferior quality (as proxied by target firm industrial efficiency or the target CEO's...

Consistent with the view that “busy” analysts face time and effort constraints in monitoring firms, we find that higher busyness lowers firm valuation. The underlying mechanisms include lower operating performance, higher cost of capital, greater earnings management, excessive CEO...

Does it matter for firm performance whether corporations have access to high-quality courts for litigating their internal affairs? To shed some light on this question, this paper focuses on the creation of business courts in various states between 1990 and 2015. Employing a...